FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

With the (perfectly reasonable) discourse around folks working in tech who are on board with baking surveillance into everything, I guess I need to tell the story of the psychiatrist who didn't understand why someone wouldn't do that.

A couple of years back I was hospitalized for 24x7 monitoring while they were trying to figure out what was causing my seizures. This involved a certain amount of poking, prodding, and talking to specialists, including psychiatrists.

(I have two psychiatrist stories from this hospitalization, this is just the first one.)

Anyway, the psychiatrist in question was asking me about my career and what I do (because I live in the Bay Area, and the hospital in question is right in the middle of Silicon Valley). I was talking about what I did, and why, and I happened to mention that there are things that I won't work on, which has impacted my career over the years (and which I regret not in the slightest). This included telling recruiters for Palantir to go away, and not developing certain kinds of bots for my exocortex because there are ethical concerns.

Basically, the psychiatrist kept asking me questions because she couldn't figure out why someone she thought was a pretty standard Silicon Valley techbro would refuse to work on surveillance or tracking technologies. Absolutely couldn't wrap her head around it. Why would someone care about second- and third-order impacts? Why would I care about abusive realtionships?

She might've been prodding me to see how I'd react (which would make sense as a diagnostic technique), but I'm pretty sure she didn't know I was listening in on her talking with a colleague in the hallway about me (hey, she's not talking about anybody not me, I can do that) about why I'd be so preoccupied with not wanting to hurt other people.

This lead to another couple of consultations with another group of psychiatrists, which I think very nearly got me 5150'd as delusional.

But. The point I'm trying to make is this: When it comes to Silicon Valley, thinking that any of the surveillance stuff going on right now - Palantir, drone tracking, privacy, all the way down to stuff along the lines of Microsoft Recall - is harmful and probably shouldn't be done is considered deeply weird. Possibly pathologically weird.

I don't know. That's just a couple of data points. Back to work.

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